Saturday, August 31, 2013

Is this “working for a living” thing really
necessary?I’m prompted to ask this
because now, at semester's end, I have to face a huge stack of
papers-to-be-graded.Bummer.

Actually, it turns out that we are putting in too
much time on the job.As any expert on
the Paleolithic Era will tell you, people are "designed" (in Darwinian terms) to do economically
productive work for only about 20 hours a week.The rest of our time should, in true Stone Age fashion, be dedicated to socializing,
singing, dancing, loafing around and doing whatever the hell we want.Which, no doubt, is why we generally feel both
overworked, and unable to spend as much time as we would like just hanging with
our buddies.

Pertinent to all this, my friend Jonathan W. recently
sent me an article on “bullshit jobs” written by anthropologist David Graeber.Graeber’s piece begins thus:

“In the
year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology
would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the
United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to
believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And
yet it didn’t happen.”

Professor Graeber (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

From here, Graeber goes on to say that we (that
is, all of us) don’t really have to work forty hours a week to maintain a
comfortable standard of living, but, since our economy is controlled by a
super-rich elite, most of us are harnessed into pointless bullshit jobs designed
to facilitate the further enrichment of that elite.Our energies are consumed in this “work”
while our spirits are intimidated by the prospect of unemployment.Thus are we neutralized by and for the sake
of the one percent.

Neither Graeber nor I feel that teaching is a
bullshit job (not even the teaching of anthropology).Nor is bus driving, nor welding, etc.These jobs involve making things that people need
or providing them with worthwhile services.

But corporate law?Now there’s some bullshit.It
seems to me that the job of corporate lawyers is to facilitate the exploitation
of

1. the
very customers whose dollars ultimately pay the lawyers’ salaries and

2. the
workers who make the products that justify the corporation’s existence.

In Graeber’s words, “[W]hat does it say about our
society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented
poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate
law?”

I’d venture to guess that the only way out of the
bullshit-bloated economy that engulfs us is to educate people about the power
structure that sustains it.This belief makes
educators like me troublemakers, or it would make us such if we had any
influence to speak of.The real troublemakers
are those, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who not only see through the
bullshit, but have a significant power base.

And how can we get more people like Elizabeth
Warren into positions of power?The
first step would be to get private money out of Congressional and Presidential elections.Let these elections be paid for with public
money, and let ExxonMobil, WalMart, the Koch brothers, etc., spend their excess
wealth on charity instead of the purchase of political influence.

The root of the problem is that, as of now, finance capital
both controls the bullshit economy and virtually owns the government.Right-wing “populists” claim that government IS
the problem, but the real problem is that government can’t properly serve us
until it gains some independence from private capital.Misguided populists want to “shrink” the
government, but shrinking the government just makes it that much easier for the
moneyed interests to dupe and drain us without restraint.What we really need is for a powerful
government - genuinely responsive to the voters - to kick some corporate
butt.And I'm afraid that won’t happen as long as
Conglomocorp owns Congress and Joe Sixpack imagines that Elizabeth Warren is
his enemy.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Psychologist Solomon
Asch, in a famous 1958 experiment, revealed that people often give wrong
answers to simple questions if they first see others around them giving the
wrong answer. Which is to say that people
are often dumb, or at least they act dumb, because they desperately want to
conform to their group.Or, as Professor
Asch put it, “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that
reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white
black.”

c.A
fine southern tradition ordained by God and supported by the law of the land.

I’ve been reading a biography of
Ulysses S. Grant lately (who himself briefly owned, then emancipated, a slave),
and I have been struck, once again, by the ferocity with which antebellum
southerners clung to answer “c” above.

Were white southerners a bunch of
idiots in those days?Well, yes.However, they were idiots not because their brains
malfunctioned, but because they lived surrounded by neighbors and institutions
that compelled belief in a grossly unjust and inhumane institution.Only the violence of defeat in war shook them
halfway toward their right minds.Today,
most southern whites would not condone out-and-out slavery.

Along these same lines, I saw Ben
Stein being interviewed on CNN last week about Richard Nixon’s legacy and was again
struck by how easily social influence can compel humans to delude themselves.Mr. Stein (who was once a Nixon speechwriter)
claimed that Richard Nixon was an outstanding president and one of the world’s
great peacemakers, worthy of high praise and great acclaim. The CNN
interviewer, to her credit, did not stare at Stein open-mouthed and shout, “Are
you out of your goddam mind?!!!”

I’m not sure I could have been as
calm as she was on hearing such high praise for Nixon, the man who, in 1954,
advocated dropping atomic bombs on the Vietnamese in order to crush them as they fought to gain their independence from the French.This
same Richard Nixon also prolonged the American war with Vietnam in order to avoid being known to history as the president who lost a war and to
ensure his 1972 re-election by showing that he was “tough.”Mr. Stein, please take your place in history
right there next to Mr. Jefferson Davis.

And then there is this: last week, Fox
News interviewer Lauren Green relentlessly grilled Professor Reza Aslan, scholar of
religion, on the question of why he, a Muslim (gasp!), would want to write about
Jesus. This has been called one of the
most embarrassing Fox News interviews ever, but I disagree.It seems to me that Fox News specializes in
asking stupid questions and in purveying idiotic and prejudicial
misinformation.

It is, in fact, Fox News that is largely
responsible for the inability of so many right-wing extremists to connect with reality. What Fox does is to generate a pseudo-reality, one that Bill Maher refers to as the conservative Republican bubble.

- guns are not
responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans every year,- and, the rise of
conservatism since 1980 has had no negative effects on the economic well-being
of poor and middle class Americans.

Since these statements are all
flat-out wrong or, at best, grossly misleading, how can so many right-wingers
continue to believe them?The answer
lies partly in the Asch experiment.Like
their slavery-loving predecessors, these (mainly white) Americans gain
confidence in their misperceptions by seeing their like-minded neighbors
touting them.

But there’s another factor: the
influence of Fox News itself.Fifty
years ago America was plagued by people who clung tenaciously to nutty ideas,
and among the best known of these were members of the John Birch Society - like Fred Koch, founding Birch Society member and father of Charles and David.

But the Birchers were a marginalized
minority, widely viewed by ordinary Americans as quite the wackos.Sadly, Birch-style looniness lives on today,
not on the margins of society, but right smack in our midst.And who put it here?More than anyone, I would say Fox News founder, Rupert Murdoch.

Fox News, by virtue of its being
a slickly produced and well-funded media monster, has managed to give
right-wing nuttiness a sheen of respectability.Fox is like a kind of perpetual-motion machine, endlessly pouring
out crapulous drivel so that half the nation may be richly engorged day after
day with ignorant blather -blather with a sinister point.

Fox News ultimately begat the Tea
party and what has the Tea Party begotten?Sequestration, gridlock, and general political malaise.Wherein, O Lord, does our salvation lie?It may be that the heirs of the slavery-lovers
will only be marginalized when white people decline in influence.

I am not anti-white.Some of my best friends are white.But let’s face facts: it is the people who
are militantly white and who see the non-white and non-Christian world as a threat
who are most susceptible to Fox News.My
wish is not to see white people suffer, but only to see these awful ideas,
ideas that are so deeply entrenched in so much of white America, consigned to
oblivion.Let these loony ideas live on,
if they must, but let them cling desperately to life only in the dank, moldy
nooks and crannies of the nation, as they did in the good old days, the days
before Fox made them seem socially acceptable.